Dendermonde (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Last weekend, the Dendermonde police executed a tactic that involved misleading Waze users by making fake police check-point reports throughout the region. The Police will go to different places, check in using the GPS application, and then proceed to the next checkpoint.
The Dendermonde police deceived the Waze users by indicating fake police checkpoints in an effort to stop people from turning away from real police operations. This created confusion for drivers about the location of genuine police checkpoints, as many fake police checkpoints were reported in Waze. The purpose was to ensure that drivers did not intentionally avoid passing through authentic check-point barriers.
Through this strategy, the Police came up with over 60 fake reports that confused motorists. The Dendermonde police complained that new police checks appear on Waze very quickly, and they cannot delete them from the application. In order to counteract this, they devised a plan to saturate the application with such fake details. Chief of Police Patrick Feys explained,
“That way, drivers can no longer see the forest for the trees.”
He also added that although officers used to pull over to some areas to conduct searches, not all reported checkpoints led to one. They were locations where we actually stood for a while and could thus also frisk people. As he pointed out, however,
“But we did not always do that”.
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Posted by Lokale Politie Dendermonde on Sunday, January 19, 2025
Why did the Police set fake checkpoints?
The police publicised their actions of fake enforcement on social media; residents supported it, and like the police, they reported fake actions on Waze as well. For a while, more than sixty police checkpoints were reported in Dendermonde, and most of them were fake. This unconventional methodology highlights the persistent challenges felt by police in controlling the reception and use of traffic law enforcement technologies. The same strategies have been observed in other parts of the world as police forces face challenges posed by navigation applications on driver attitudes and adherence to traffic rules.
